One again the great Matt Taibbi is taking no prisoners in his new article in this months Rolling Stone Magazine.
The title of the article is: The Great American Bubble Machine
(Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression).
One of the subjects that he goes into is just how deeply entrenched in our government and in particular how several former Goldman Sachs CEOs have been or are now Presidents of various branches of the Federal Reserve Banks throughout our country. As Matt says: 'they are everywhere' and after reading the article you will certainly understand what a bunch of Banksta Ganstas these people are.
The conflict of interests is astounding and the level of market manipulation is staggering. It is interesting to note that upon release of the article Goldman Sachs immediately started using that word: conspiracy theories - which is exactly what their dear, dear friends at the Federal Reserve always say when ever someone starts to tell the truth about them.
The piece has generated controversy, with Goldman Sachs firing back that Taibbi's piece is "an hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories" and a spokesman adding, "We reject the assertion that we are inflators of bubbles and profiteers in busts, and we are painfully conscious of the importance in being a force for good." Taibbi shot back: "Goldman has its alumni pushing its views from the pulpit of the U.S. Treasury, the NYSE, the World Bank, and numerous other important posts; it also has former players fronting major TV shows. They have the ear of the president if they want it."
I'm going to put down just a few of the passages Matt writes about, but by all means, please take the time to read his article at:
http://www.rollingstone.com/...
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.
Matt talks about how the Goldman Sachs vampire blood suckers cashed on on the housing meltdown and the speculation market on gasoline.
Goldman's role in the sweeping global disaster that was the housing bubble is not hard to trace. Here again, the basic trick was a decline in underwriting standards, although in this case the standards weren't in IPOs but in mortgages. By now almost everyone knows that for decades mortgage dealers insisted that home buyers be able to produce a down payment of 10 percent or more, show a steady income and good credit rating, and possess a real first and last name. Then, at the dawn of the new millennium, they suddenly threw all that shit out the window and started writing mortgages on the backs of napkins to cocktail waitresses and ex-cons carrying five bucks and a Snickers bar.
And what caused the huge spike in oil prices? Take a wild guess. Obviously Goldman had help — there were other players in the physical-commodities market — but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once-solid market into a speculative casino. Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures — agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed.
And Goldman Sachs made out far better than anyone else during the 'Great Heist' of the taxpayers:
Immediately after the AIG bailout, Paulson announced his federal bailout for the financial industry, a $700 billion plan called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and put a heretofore unknown 35-year-old Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari in charge of administering the funds. In order to qualify for bailout monies, Goldman announced that it would convert from an investment bank to a bank-holding company, a move that allows it access not only to $10 billion in TARP funds, but to a whole galaxy of less conspicuous, publicly backed funding — most notably, lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve. By the end of March, the Fed will have lent or guaranteed at least $8.7 trillion under a series of new bailout programs — and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients of the monies remain almost entirely secret.
It really boggles the brain ......$8.7 trillion dollars and no one is even allowed to ask the Federal Reserve who the fuck got all that money. Still think we are democracy?
Since Goldman Sachs has sucked the blood out of most of the bubbles and their 'kicks just keep getting harder to find' they are moving on to new victims - that would be the taxpayer, and that is one of the reasons you can't tell the difference these days between members of Congress and Goldman Sachs.
Fast-forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.
Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's co-head of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion- dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade. The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.
It is really too bad that we do not have the means to a National Referendum. I feel that this is the only way we will ever be able to out law lobbyists like Goldman Sachs. Perhaps a Constitutional Amendment would be possible, because I know that there is simply no way that 'election reform' is ever going to happen. The Senators and House members are not going to vote out the 'money machines' that keep their 'fat cat' jobs flush....it just isn't ever going to happen.
Meanwhile, at least Matt Taibbi is speaking the truth about these financial crooks and liars who are robbing us blind every chance they get, and it's all 'perfectly legal.' We will never be able to take control of the future or our nation until the day that these kind of lobbyists are banned from the halls of Congress.
UPDATE: Wow, thanks people....first time on the HOT LIST. I wrote this last night, was so beat from the heat, I just went to bed. I just love Matt Taibbi, he pulls no punches and I hope his next article will be an expose of the mysterious Federal Reserve that has all the money and answers to no one.